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It was, I think, in 1881 that Turgénev while visiting me took out of his portmanteau a small French book entitled La Maison Tellier, and gave it to me.

“Read it some time,” said he in an off-hand way just as, a year before, he had given me a number of Russian Wealth that contained an article by Garshin, who was then only beginning to write. Evidently on this occasion, as in Garshin’s case, he was afraid of influencing me one way or the other and wished to know my own unbiassed opinion.

“It is by a young French writer,” said he. “Have a look at it. It isn’t bad. He knows you and appreciates you highly,” he added as if wishing to propitiate me. “As a man he reminds me of Druzhinin. He is, like Druzhmin, an excellent son, an admirable friend, un homme d’un commerce sûr, and, besides that, he associates with the working people, guides them, and helps them. Even in his relations with women he reminds me of Druzhinin.” And Turgénev told me something astonishing, incredible, of Maupassant’s conduct in that respect.

That time (1881) was for me a period of most ardent inner reconstruction of my whole outlook on life, and in this reconstruction the activity called the fine arts, to which I had formerly devoted all my powers, had not only lost the importance I formerly attributed to it, but had become simply obnoxious to me on account of the unnatural position it had hitherto occupied in my life, as it does generally in the estimation of the people of the well-to-do classes.

And therefore such works as the one Turgénev was recommending to me did not then interest me in the least. But to please him I read the book he had handed me.

From the first story, La Maison Tellier, despite the indecency and insignificance of the subject of the story, I could not help recognizing that the author had what is called talent.

He possessed that particular gift called talent, which consists in the capacity to direct intense concentrated attention according to the author’s tastes on this or that subject, in consequence of which the man endowed with this capacity sees in the things to which he directs his attention some new aspect which others have overlooked; and this gift of seeing what others have not seen Maupassant evidently possessed. But judging by the little volume I read, he unfortunately lacked the chief of the three conditions, besides talent, essential to a true work of art. These are: (1) a correct, that is, a moral relation of the author to his subject; (2) clearness of expression, or beauty of form, — the two are identical; and (3) sincerity, that is, a sincere feeling of love or hatred of what the artist depicts. Of these three, Maupassant possessed only the two last and was quite lacking in the first. He had not a correct, that is a moral, relation to the subjects depicted.

Judging by what I read I was convinced that Maupassant possessed talent, that is to say, the gift of attention revealing in the objects and facts of life with which he deals qualities others have not perceived. He was also master of a beautiful style, expressing what he wanted to say clearly, simply, and with charm. He was also master of that condition of true artistic production without which a work of art does not produce its effect, namely, sincerity; that is, he did not pretend that he loved or hated, but really loved or hated what he described. But unfortunately lacking the first and perhaps the chief condition of worthy artistic production, a correct moral relation to what he described — that is to say, a knowledge of the difference between good and evil — he loved and described things that should not have been loved and described. Thus, in this little volume, the author described with great detail and fondness how women seduce men, and men women; and in La femme de Paul he even describes certain obscenities difficult to understand. And he presents the country labouring folk not merely with indifference but even with contempt, as though they were animals.

This unconsciousness of the difference between good and evil is particularly striking in the story, Une partie de campagne, in which is given, as a very pleasant and amusing joke, a detailed description of how two men rowing with bare arms in a boat tempt and afterwards seduce at the same time, one of them an elderly mother and the other a young girl, her daughter.

The sympathy of the author is evidently all the time so much on the side of these two wretches that he not merely ignores, but simply does not see, what must have been felt by the seduced mother and the maid (her daughter), by the father, and by a young man who is evidently engaged to the daughter; and therefore, not merely is an objectionable description of a revolting crime presented in the form of an amusing jest, but the occurrence itself is described falsely, for what is given is only one side, and that the most insignificant — namely, the pleasure received by the rascals.

In that same little volume there is a story, Histoire d’une fille de ferme, which Turgénev particularly recommended to me and which particularly displeased me, again by this incorrect relation of the author to his subject. He evidently sees in all the working folk he describes mere animals, who rise to nothing more than sexual and maternal love, so that his descriptions give one an incomplete and artificial impression.

Lack of understanding of the life and interests of working people and the presentation of them as semi-brutes moved only by sensuality, spite, and greed, is one of the chief and most important defects of most recent French writers, including Maupassant, who not only in this but in all his other stories where he refers to the people, always describes them as coarse, dull animals at whom one can only laugh. Of course the French writers should know the nature of their own people better than I do; but despite the fact that I am a Russian and have not lived among the French peasants, I nevertheless affirm that in so representing their people the French authors are wrong, and that the French labourers cannot be such as they represent them to be. If France — such as we know her, with her truly great men and the great contributions those great men have made to science, art, citizenship, and the moral development of mankind — if this France exists, then that working class which has maintained and maintains on its shoulders this France with its great men, must consist not of brutes but of people with great spiritual qualities, and I therefore do not believe what I read in novels such as La terre and in Maupassant’s stories; just as I should not believe it if I were told of the existence of a beautiful house standing without foundations. It may very well be these high qualities of the people are not such as are described to us in La petite Fadette and La mère aux diables, but I am firmly convinced that these qualities exist, and a writer who portrays the people only as Maupassant does, describing with sympathy only the hanches and gorges of the Breton servant-girls and describing with detestation and ridicule the life of the labouring men, commits a great artistic mistake, because he describes his subject only from one, and that the least interesting, physical, side and leaves quite out of sight another, and the most important, spiritual, side wherein the essence of the matter lies.

On the whole, the perusal of the little book handed me by Turgénev left me quite indifferent to the young writer.

So repugnant to me were the stories, Une partie de campagne, La femme de Paul, L’historie d’une fille de ferme, that I did not then notice the beautiful story, Le papa de Simon, and the story, excellent in its description of the night, Sur Veau.

“Are there not in our time, when so many people want to write, plenty of men of talent who do not know to what to apply this gift, or who boldly apply it to what should not, and need not, be described?” thought I. And so I said to Turgénev, and thereupon forgot about Maupassant.

The first thing of his that fell into my hands after that was Une Vie, which someone advised me to read. That book at once compelled me to change my opinion of Maupassant, and since then I have read with interest everything signed by him. Une Vie is excellent, not only incomparably the best of his novels, but perhaps the best French novel since Hugo’s Les Misérables. Here, besides remarkable talent — that special strenuous attention applied to the subject, by which the author perceives quite new features in the life he describes — are united in almost equal degree all three qualities of a true, work of art, first, a correct, that is a moral, relation of the author to his subject; secondly, beauty of form; and thirdly, sincerity, that is, love of what the author describes. Here the meaning of life no longer presents itself to the author as consisting in the adventures of various male and female libertines; here the subject, as the title indicates, is life — the life of a ruined, innocent, amiable woman, predisposed to all that is good, but ruined by precisely the same coarse animal sensuality which in his former stories the author presented as if it were the central feature of life, dominant over all else. And in this book the author’s whole sympathy is on the side of what is good.

The form, which was beautiful in the first stories, is here brought to such a pitch of perfection as, in my opinion, has been attained by no other French writer of prose. And above all, the author here really loves, and deeply loves, the good family he describes; and he really hates that coarse debauchee, who destroys the happiness and peace of that charming family and, in particular, ruins the life of the heroine.

That is why all the events and characters of this novel are so lifelike and memorable. The weak, kindly, debilitated mother; the upright, weak, attractive father; the daughter, still more attractive in her simplicity, artlessness, and sympathy with all that is good; their mutual relations, their first journey, their servants and neighbours; the calculating, grossly sensual, mean, petty, insolent suitor, who as usual deceives the innocent girl by the customary empty idealization of the foulest instincts; the marriage, Corsica with the beautiful descriptions of nature, and then village life, the husband’s coarse faithlessness, his seizure of power over the property, his quarrel with his father-in-law, the yielding of the good people and the victory of insolence; the relations with the neighbours — all this is life itself in its complexity and variety. And not only is all this vividly and finely described, but the sincere pathetic tone of it all involuntarily infects the reader. One feels that the author loves this woman, and loves her not for her external form but for her soul, for the goodness there is in her; that he pities her and suffers on her account, and this feeling is involuntarily communicated to the reader. And the questions: Why, for what end, is this fine creature ruined? Ought it indeed to be so? arise of themselves in the reader’s soul, and compel him to reflect on the meaning of human life.

Despite the false notes which occur in the novel, such as the minute description of the young girl’s skin, or the impossible and unnecessary details of how, by the advice of an abbé, the forsaken wife again became a mother — details which destroy all the charm of the heroine’s purity — and despite the melodramatic and unnatural story of the injured husband’s revenge; notwithstanding these blemishes, the novel not only seemed to me excellent, but I saw behind it no longer a talented chatterer and jester who neither knew nor wished to know right from wrong — as from his first little book Maupassant had appeared to me to be — but a serious man penetrating deeply into life and already beginning to see his way in it.

The next novel of Maupassant’s that I read was Bel-Ami.

Bel-Ami is a very dirty book. The author evidently gives himself a free hand in describing what attracts him, and at times seems to lose his main negative attitude towards his hero and to pass over to his side: but on the whole Bel-Ami, like Une Vie, has at its base a serious idea and sentiment. In Une Vie the fundamental idea is perplexity in face of the cruel meaninglessness of the suffering life of an excellent woman ruined by a man’s coarse sensuality; whereas here it is not only perplexity, but indignation, at the prosperity and success of a coarse, sensual brute who by that very sensuality makes his career and attains a high position in society; and indignation also at the depravity of the whole sphere in which the hero attains his success. In the former novel the author seems to ask: “For what, and why, was a fine creature ruined? Why did it happen?” Here in the latter novel he seems to answer: all that is pure and good has perished and is perishing in our society, because that society is depraved, senseless, and horrible.

The last scene in the novel — the marriage in a fashionable church of the triumphant scoundrel, decorated with the Legion of Honour, to the pure girl, the daughter of an elderly and formerly irreproachable mother whom he had seduced; a wedding blessed by a bishop and regarded as something good and proper by everybody — expresses this idea with extraordinary force. In this novel, despite the fact that it is encumbered with dirty details (in which it is to be regretted that the author seems to find pleasure) the same serious demands are presented to life.

Read the conversation of the old poet with Duroy when after dinner, if I remember rightly, they are leaving the Walters. The old poet bares life to his young companion, and shows it as it is, with its eternal and inevitable concomitant and end — death.

“She has hold of me already, la gueuse (the old hag) says he of death. “She has already shaken out my teeth, torn out my hair, crippled my limbs, and is now ready to swallow me. I am already in her power. She is only playing with me, as a cat does with a mouse, knowing that I cannot escape. Fame? Riches? What is the use of them, since they cannot buy a woman’s love? For it is only a woman’s love that makes life worth living, and that too death takes away. It takes that away, and then one’s health, strength, and life itself. It is the same for everyone, and there is nothing else.”

Such is the meaning of what the old poet says. But Duroy, the successful lover of all the women who please him, is so full of sensual energy and strength that he hears and does not hear, understands and does not understand, the old poet’s words. He hears and understands, but the source of sensual life throbs in him so strongly that this unquestionable truth, foretelling the same end for him, does not disturb him.

This inner contradiction, besides its satirical value, gives the novel its chief significance. The same idea gleams in the fine scenes of the death of the consumptive journalist. The author sets himself the question: What is this life? How solve the contradiction between the love of life, and the knowledge of inevitable death? He seems to seek, pauses, and does not decide either one way or the other. And therefore the moral relation to life in this novel continues to be correct.

But in the novels that follow, this moral relation to life grows confused. The appraisement of the phenomena of life begins to waver, to grow obscure, and in the last novels it is quite perverted.

In Mont-Oriol Maupassant seems to unite the motives of his two previous novels and repeats himself to order. Despite the fine descriptions of the fashionable watering-place and of the medical activity in it, which is executed with delicate taste, we have here the same bull-like Paul, just as empty and despicable as the husband in Une Vie; and the same deceived, frank, meek, weak, lonely — always lonely — good woman, and the same impassive triumph of pettiness and triviality as in Bel-Ami.

The thought is the same, but the author’s moral relation to what he describes is already much lower, lower especially than in Une Vie. The author’s inner appraisement of right and wrong begins to get confused. Notwithstanding his abstract wish to be impartially objective, the scoundrel Paul evidently has all his sympathy, and therefore the love story of this Paul and his attempts at and success in seduction produce a discordant impression. The reader does not know what the author intends: is it to show the whole emptiness and vileness of Paul (who turns indifferently away from, and insults, a woman merely because her waist has been spoilt by her pregnancy with his child); or, on the contrary, is it to show how pleasant and easy it is to live as this Paul lives?

In the next novels, Pierre et Jean, Fort comme la mort, and Notre cœur, the authors moral attitude towards his characters becomes still more confused, and in the last-named is quite lost. All these novels bear the stamp of indifference, haste, unreality, and, above all, again that same absence of a correct moral relation to life which was present in his first writings. This began from the time when Maupassant’s reputation as a fashionable author had become established and he became liable to the temptation, so terrible in our day, to which every celebrated writer is subject, especially one so attractive as Maupassant. In the first place the success of his first novels, the praise of the press, and the flattery of society, especially of women; in the second the ever increasing amount of remuneration (never however keeping up with his continually increasing wants); in the third the pertinacity of editors outbidding one another, flattering, begging, and no longer judging the merits of the works the author offers but enthusiastically accepting everything signed by a name now established with the public. All these temptations are so great that they evidently turn his head, and he succumbs to them; and though he continues to elaborate the form of his work as well as or sometimes even better than before, and even though he is fond of what he describes, yet he no longer loves it because it is good or moral and lovable to all, or hates it because it is evil and hateful to all, but only because one thing pleases and another thing happens to displease him.

On all Maupassant’s novels, beginning with Bel-Ami, there lies this stamp of haste and still more of artificiality. From that time Maupassant no longer did what he had done in his first two novels. He did not take as his basis certain moral demands and on that ground describe the actions of his characters, but wrote as all hack novelists do, that is, he devised the most interesting and pathetic, or most up-to-date persons and situations, and made a novel out of them, adorning it with whatever observations he had opportunity to make which fitted into the framework of the story, quite indifferent as to how the incidents described were related to the demands of morality. Such are Pierre et Jean, Fort comme la mort, and Notre cœur.

Accustomed as we are to read in French novels of how families live in threes, always with a lover known to everyone except the husband, it still remains quite unintelligible to us how it happens that all husbands are always fools, cocus et ridicules, (Deceived and ridiculous) but all lovers (who themselves in the end marry and become husbands) are not only not cocus et ridicules, but are heroic! And still less comprehensible is it how all women can be depraved, and yet all mothers saintly.

And on these unnatural and unlikely, and above all profoundly immoral, propositions Pierre et Jean and Fort comme la mort are built, and therefore the sufferings of the characters so situated affect us but little. The mother of Pierre and Jean, who can live her whole life deceiving her husband, evokes little sympathy when she is obliged to confess her sin to her son, and still less when she justifies herself by asserting that she could not but avail herself of the chance of happiness which presented itself. Still less can we sympathize with the gentleman who, in Fort comme la mort, having all his life deceived his friend and debauched his friend’s wife, now only regrets that having grown old he cannot seduce his mistress’s daughter. The last novel, Notre cœur, has even no kernel at all beyond the description of various kinds of sex-love. The satiated emotions of an idle debauchee are described, who does not know what he wants, and who first lives with a woman yet more depraved than himself — a mentally depraved woman, who lacks even the excuse of sensuality — then leaves her and lives with a servant girl, and then again rejoins the former, and, it seems, lives with them both. If in Pierre et Jean and Fort comme la mort there are still some touching scenes, this last novel excites only disgust.

The question in Maupassant’s first novel, Une Vie, consists in this: here is a human being, good, wise, pleasing, ready for all that is good, and this creature is for some reason offered up as a sacrifice first to a coarse, small-minded, stupid animal of a husband, without having given anything to the world. Why is this? The author puts that question and as it were gives no answer, but his whole novel, all his feeling of pity for her and abhorrence of what has ruined her, serves as answer. If there is a man who has understood her suffering and expressed it, then it is redeemed, as Job put it to his friends when they said that no one would know of his sufferings. When suffering is recognized and understood, it is redeemed; and here the author has recognized and understood and shown men this suffering, and the suffering is redeemed, for once it is understood by men it will sooner or later be done away with.

In the next novel, Bel-Ami, the question no longer is, Why do good persons suffer? but Why do wealth and fame go to the unworthy? What are wealth and fame? How are they obtained? And as before, these questions carry with them their own answers, which consist in the repudiation of all that the crowd of men so highly prize. The subject of this second novel is still serious, but the moral relation of the author to the subject he describes already weakens considerably, and whereas in the first novel blots and sensuality which spoil it only appear here and there, in Bel-Ami these blots have increased and many chapters are filled with dirt alone, which seems to please the author.

In the next book, Mont-Oriol, the questions: Why, and to what end, does the amiable woman suffer and the savage male secure success and happiness? are no longer put; but it seems tacitly admitted that it should be so, and hardly any moral demands are felt. But without the least necessity, uncalled for by any artistic consideration, dirty sensual descriptions are presented. As an example of this violation of artistic taste, resulting from the author’s incorrect relation to his subject, the detailed description in this novel of the heroine in her bath is specially striking. This description is quite unnecessary, and is in no way connected either with the external or the inner purpose of the novel: “Bubbles appear on her pink skin.”

“Well, what of that?” asks the reader.

“Nothing more,” replies the author. “I describe it because I like such descriptions.”

In the next novels, Pierre et Jean and Fort comme la mort, no moral demand at all is perceptible. Both novels are built on debauchery, deceit, and falsehood, which bring the actors to tragic situations.

In the last novel, Notre cœur, the position of the actors is most monstrous, wild, and immoral; they no longer struggle with anything, but only seek satisfaction for their vanity, sensuality, and sexual desires; and the author appears quite to sympathize with their aims. The only deduction one can draw from this last novel is that the greatest pleasure in life consists in sexual intercourse, and that therefore one must secure that happiness in the pleasantest way.

Yet more striking is this immoral relation to life in the half-novel, Yvette. The subject, which is horrible in its immorality, is as follows: A charming girl, innocent in soul and depraved only in the manners she has learned in her mother’s dissolute circle, leads a libertine into error. He falls in love with her, but imagining that this girl knowingly chatters the obscene nonsense she has picked up in her mother’s society and repeats parrot-like without understanding — imagining that she is already depraved — he coarsely offers her an immoral union. This proposal horrifies and offends her (for she loves him); it opens her eyes to her own position and to that of her mother, and she suffers profoundly. This deeply touching scene is admirably described: the collision between a beautiful innocent soul and the depravity of the world. And with that it might end; but the author, without either external or inner necessity, continues to write and makes this man penetrate by night to the girl and seduce her. Evidently in the first part of the story the author was on the girl’s side, but in the later part he has suddenly gone over to the debauchee, and the one impression destroys the other — the whole novel crumbles and falls to pieces like ill-kneaded bread.

In all his novels after Bel-Ami (I am not now speaking of the short stories, which constitute his chief merit and glory — of them later) Maupassant evidently submitted to the theory which ruled not only in his circle in Paris, but which now rules everywhere among artists: that for a work of art it is not only unnecessary to have any clear conception of what is right and wrong, but that, on the contrary, an artist should completely ignore all moral questions, there being even a certain artistic merit in so doing. According to this theory the artist may or should depict what is true to life, what really is, what is beautiful and therefore pleases him, or even what may be useful as material for “science”; but that to care about what is moral or immoral, right or wrong, is not an artist’s’ business.

I remember a celebrated painter showing me one of his pictures representing a religious procession. It was all excellently painted, but no relation of the artist to his subject was perceptible.

“And do you regard these ceremonies as good and consider that they should be performed, or not?” I asked him.

With some condescension to my naïveté, he told me that he did not know about that and did not want to know it; his business was to represent life.

“But at any rate you sympathize with this?”

“I cannot say so.”

“Well then do you dislike these ceremonies?”

“Neither the one thing nor the other,” replied, with a smile of compassion at my silliness, this modern, highly cultured artist who depicted life without understanding its purpose and neither loving nor hating its phenomena.

And so unfortunately thought Maupassant.

In his preface to Pierre et Jean he says that people say to a writer, “Consolez-moi, amusez-moi, attristez-moi, attendrissez-moi, faites-moi rêver, faites-moi rire, faites-moi frémir, faites-moi pleurer, faites-moi penser. Seuls quelques esprits d’élites demandent à Vartiste: faites-moi quelque chose de beau dans la forme qui vous conviendra le mieux d’après votre tempérament.”

(“Console me, amuse me, sadden me, touch my heart, make me dream, make me laugh, make me tremble, make me weep, make me think. Only a few chosen spirits bid the artist compose something beautiful, in the form that best suits his temperament.”)

Responding to this demand of the élite Maupassant wrote his novels, naïvely imagining that what was considered beautiful in his circle was that beauty which art should serve.

And in the circle in which Maupassant moved, the beauty which should be served by art was, and is, chiefly woman — young, pretty, and for the most part naked — and sexual connection with her. It was so considered not only by all Maupassant’s comrades in art — painters, sculptors, novelists, and poets — but also by philosophers, the teachers of the rising generation. Thus the famous Renan, in his work, Marc Aurèle, p. 555, when blaming Christianity for not understanding feminine beauty, plainly says:

“La défaut du christianisme apparaît bien ici. Il est trop uniquement moral; la beauté, chez lui, est tout-à-fait sacrifiée. Or, aux yeux d’une philosophie complète, la beauté, loin d’etre un avantage superficiel, un danger, un inconvénient, est un don de Dieu, comme la vertu. Elle vaut la vertu; la femme belle exprime aussi bien une face du but divin, une des fins de Dieu, que l’homme de génie ou la femme vertueuse. Elle le sent et de là sa fierté. Elle sent instinctivement le trésor infini qu’elle porte en son corps; elle sait bien que, sans esprit, sans talent, sans grande vertu, elle compte entre les premières manifestations de Dieu. Et pourquoi lui interdire de mettre en valeur le don qui lui a été fait, de sertir le diamant qui lui est échu? La femme, en se parant, accomplit un devoir; elle pratique un art, art exquis, en un sens le plus charmant des arts. Ne nous laissons pas égarer par le sourire que certain mots provoquent chez LES GENS FRIVOLES. On décerne le palme du génie à l’artiste grec qui a su résoudre le plus délicat des problèmes, orner le corps humain, c’est à dire orner la perfection même, et Von ne veut voir qu’une affaire de chiffons dans l’essai de collaborer à la plus belle œuvre de Dieu, à la beauté de la femme! La toilette de la femme, avec tous ses raffinements est du grand art à sa manière. Les siècles et les pays qui savent y réussir sont les grands siècles, les grands pays, et le christianisme montra, par l’exclusion dont il frappa ce genre de recherches, que l’idéal social qu’il concevait ne deviendrait le cadre d’une société complète que bien plus tard, quand la révolte des gens du monde aurait brisé le joug étroit imposé primitivement à la secte par un piétisme exalté.”

(The defect of Christianity is clearly seen in this. It is too exclusively moral; it quite sacrifices beauty. But in the eyes of a complete philosophy beauty, far from being a superficial advantage, a danger, an inconvenience, is a gift of God, like virtue. It is worth as much as virtue; the beautiful woman expresses an aspect of the divine purpose, one of God’s aims, as well as a man of genius does, or a virtuous woman. She feels this, and hence her pride. She is instinctively conscious of the infinite treasure she possesses in her body; she is well aware that without intellect, without talent, without great virtue, she counts among the chief manifestations of God. And why forbid her to make the most of the gift bestowed upon her, or to give the diamond allotted to her its due setting? By adorning herself woman accomplishes a duty; she practises an art, an exquisite art, in a sense the most charming of arts. Do not let us be misled by the smile which certain words provoke in the frivolous. We award the palm of genius to the Greek artist who succeeded in solving the most delicate of problems, that of adorning the human body, that is to say, adorning perfection itself, and yet some people wish to see nothing more than an affair of chiffons in the attempt to collaborate with the finest work of God — woman’s beauty! Woman’s toilette with all its refinements is a great art in its own way. The epochs and countries which can succeed in this are the great epochs and great countries, and Christianity, by the embargo it laid on this kind of research, showed that the social ideal it had conceived would only become the framework of a complete society at a much later period, when the revolt of men of the world had broken the narrow yoke originally imposed on the sect by a fanatical pietism.)

(So that in the opinion of this leader of the young generation only now have Paris milliners and coiffeurs corrected the mistake committed by Christianity, and re-established beauty in the true and lofty position due to it.)

In order that there should be no doubt as to how one is to understand beauty, the same celebrated writer, historian, and savant wrote the drama, L’Abbesse de Jouarre, in which he showed that to have sexual intercourse with a woman is a service of this beauty, that is to say, is an elevated and good action. In that drama, which is striking by its lack of talent and especially by the coarseness of the conversations between d’Arcy and the abbesse, in which the first words make it evident what sort of love that gentleman is discussing with the supposedly innocent and highly moral maiden, who is not in the least offended thereby — in that drama it is shown that the most highly moral people, at the approach of death to which they are condemned, a few hours before it arrives, can do nothing more beautiful than yield to their animal passions.

So that in the circle in which Maupassant grew up and was educated, the representation of feminine beauty and sex-love was and is regarded quite seriously, as a matter long ago decided and recognized by the wisest and most learned men, as the true object of the highest art — Le grand art.

And it is this theory, dreadful in its folly, to which Maupassant submitted when he became a fashionable writer; and, as was to be expected, this false ideal led him in his novels into a series of mistakes, and to ever weaker and weaker production.

In this the fundamental difference between the demands of the novel and of the short story is seen. A novel has for its aim, even for external aim, the description of a whole human life or of many human lives, and therefore its writer should have a clear and firm conception of what is good and bad in life, and this Maupassant lacked; indeed according to the theory he held, that is just what should be avoided. Had he been a novelist like some talentless writers of sensual novels, he would, being without talent, have quietly described what was evil as good, and his novels would have had unity, and would have been interesting to people who shared his view. But Maupassant had talent, that is to say, he saw things in their essentials and therefore involuntarily discerned the truth. He involuntarily saw the evil in what he wished to consider good. That is why, in all his novels except the first, his sympathies continually waver, now presenting the evil as good, and now admitting that the evil is evil and the good good, but continually shifting from the one standpoint to the other. And this destroys the very basis of any artistic impression — the framework on which it is built. People of little artistic sensibility often think that a work of art possesses unity when the same people act in it throughout, or when it is all constructed on one plot, or describes the life of one man. That is a mistake. It only appears so to a superficial observer. The cement which binds any artistic production into one whole and therefore produces the illusion of being a reflection of life, is not the unity of persons or situations, but the unity of the author’s independent moral relation to his subject. In reality, when we read or look at the artistic production of a new author the fundamental question that arises in our soul is always of this kind: “Well, what sort of a man are you? Wherein are you different from all the people I know, and what can you tell me that is new, about how we must look at this life of ours?” Whatever the artist depicts — saints, robbers, kings, or lackeys — we seek and see only the artist’s own soul. If he is an established writer with whom we are already familiar, the question no longer is, “What sort of a man are you?” but, “Well, what more can you tell me that is new?” or, “From what new side will you now illumine life for me?” And therefore a writer who has not a clear definite and just view of the universe, and especially a man who considers that this isn’t even wanted, cannot produce a work of art. He may write much and admirably, but a work of art will not result.

So it was with Maupassant in his novels. In his first two novels, and especially in the first, Une Vie, there was a clear, definite, and new relation to life, and it was an artistic production; but as soon as, submitting to the fashionable theory, he decided that this relation of the author to life was quite unnecessary and began to write merely in order faire quelque chose de beau (to produce something beautiful), his novels ceased to be works of art. In Une Vie and Bel-Ami the author knows whom he should love and whom he should hate, and the reader agrees with him and believes in him — believes in the people and events he describes. But in Notre cœur and Yvette the author does not know whom he should love and whom he should hate, and the reader does not know either. And not knowing this, the reader does not believe in the events described and is not interested in them. And therefore, except the two first or, strictly speaking, excepting only the first novel, all Maupassant’s, as novels, are weak; and if he had left us only his novels he would have been merely a striking instance of the way in which brilliant talents may perish as a result of the false environment in which he developed and of these false theories of art that have been devised by people who neither love nor understand it. But fortunately Maupassant wrote short stories in which he did not subject himself to the false theory he had accepted, and wrote not quelque chose de beau, but what touched or revolted his moral feeling. And in these short stories — not in all, but in the best of them — we see how that moral feeling grew in the author.

And it is in this that the wonderful quality of every true artist lies, if only he does not do violence to himself under the influence of a false theory. His talent teaches its possessor and leads him forward along the path of moral development, compelling him to love what deserves love and to hate what deserves hate. An artist is an artist because he sees things not as he wishes to see them but as they really are. The possessor of a talent, the man, may make mistakes, but his talent if only it is allowed free play, as Maupassant gave it free play in his short stories, discloses, undrapes the object, and compels love of it if it deserves love and hatred of it if it deserves hatred. With every true artist, when under the influence of his circle he begins to represent what should not be represented, there happens what happened to Balaam, who, wishing to bless, cursed what should be cursed, and wishing to curse, blessed what should be blessed: involuntarily he does, not what he wishes to do but what he should do. And this happened to Maupassant.

There has hardly been another writer who so sincerely thought that all the good, all the meaning of life, lies in woman — in love, and who with such strength of passion described woman and her love from all sides; and there has hardly ever been a writer who reached such clearness and exactitude in showing all the awful phases of that very thing which had seemed to him the highest and the greatest of life’s blessings. The more he penetrated into the question the more it revealed itself, and the more did the coverings fall from it and only its horrible results and yet more horrible essence remain.

Read of the idiot son, of the night with a daughter (L’ermite), of the sailor with his sister (Le port). Le champ d’oliviers, La petite Roque, of the English girl (Miss Harriet), Monsieur Parent, L’armoire (the girl who fell asleep in the cupboard), the wedding in Sur Veau, and last expression of all, Un cas de divorce. Just what was said by Marcus Aurelius when devising means to destroy the attractiveness of this sin in his imagination, is what Maupassant does in most vivid artistic forms, turning one’s soul inside out. He wished to extol sex-love, but the better he came to know it the more he cursed it. He cursed sex-love for the misfortunes and sufferings it bears within it, and for the disillusionments and, above all, for the falsification of real love, for the fraud which is in it from which man suffers the more acutely the more trustingly he has yielded to the deception.

The powerful moral growth of the author in the course of his literary activity is recorded in indelible traits in these charming short stories and in his best book, Sur Veau.

And not alone in this involuntary and therefore all the more powerful dethronement of sex-love is the moral growth of the author seen, but also in the more and more exalted moral demands he makes upon life.

Not alone in sex-love does he see the innate contradiction between the demands of animal and rational man; he sees it in the whole organization of the world.

He sees that the world as it is, the material world, is not only not the best of worlds, but might on the contrary be quite different — this thought is strikingly expressed in Horla — and that it does not satisfy the demands of reason and life. He sees that there is some other world, or at least the demand for such another world, in the soul of man.

He is tormented not only by the irrationality of the material world and its ugliness, but by its unlovingness, its discord. I do not know a more heartrending cry of horror from one who has lost his way and is conscious of his loneliness, than the expression of this idea in that most charming story, Solitude.

The thing that most tormented Maupassant and to which he returns many times, is the painful state of isolation, spiritual isolation, of man; the barrier standing between him and his fellows; a barrier, he says, the more painfully felt the nearer one’s bodily connexion.

What is it torments him, and what would he have? What can destroy this barrier? What end this isolation? Love — not feminine love, which has become disgusting to him, but pure, spiritual, divine love. And that is what Maupassant seeks. Towards it, towards this saviour of life long since plainly disclosed to all men, he painfully strains from those fetters in which he feels himself bound.

He does not yet know how to name what he seeks. He does not wish to name it with his lips alone, lest he should profane his holy-of-holies. But his unexpressed striving, shown in his dread of loneliness, is so sincere that it infects and attracts one more strongly than many and many sermons about love, uttered only by the lips.

The tragedy of Maupassant’s life is that being in a most monstrous and immoral circle, he by the strength of his talent, by that extraordinary light which was in him, was escaping from the outlook on life held by that circle, and was already near to deliverance, was already breathing the air of freedom but, having exhausted his last strength in the struggle and not being able to make a last effort — perished without having attained freedom.

The tragedy of that ruin lies in what still afflicts the majority of the so-called cultured men of our time.

Men in general never have lived without an expression of the meaning of their life. Always and everywhere, highly-gifted men going in advance of others have appeared — the prophets, as they are called — who have explained to men the meaning and purport of their life; and always the ordinary, average men, who had not the strength to explain that meaning for themselves, have followed the explanation of life their prophets have disclosed to them.

That meaning was explained eighteen hundred years ago by Christianity, simply, clearly, indubitably, and joyfully, as is proved by the lives of all who acknowledge it and follow the guidance of life which results from that conception.

But then people appeared who misinterpreted that meaning so that it became meaningless, and men are placed in the dilemma either of acknowledging Christianity as interpreted by Orthodoxy, Lourdes, the Pope, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and so forth, or of going on with life according to the teachings of Renan and his kind, that is, living without any direction or understanding of life, following only their lusts as long as they are strong, and their habits when their lusts become feeble.

And people, ordinary people, choose the one or the other, sometimes both, first dissoluteness and then Orthodoxy; and thus whole generations live, shielding themselves with various theories, invented not to disclose the truth but to hide it. And ordinary, and more especially dull, people are content.

But there are others — not many, they are rare — such as Maupassant, who with their own eyes see things as they are, see their significance, see the contradictions in life concealed from others, and vividly realize to what these contradictions must inevitably lead them — and seek to solve them in advance. They seek these solutions everywhere except where they are to be found, namely in Christianity, because Christianity appears to them outlived and discarded, repelling them by its absurdity. And vainly trying to find these solutions for themselves, they come to the conviction that there are no solutions, and that it is inherent in life that one should always bear in oneself these unsolved contradictions. And having come to such a conclusion, if these people are feeble unenergetic natures, they put up with such meaningless life and are even proud of their position, accounting their ignorance a quality and a sign of culture. But if they are energetic, truthful, and gifted natures, such as Maupassant was, they do not endure this, but one way or other try to get out of this senseless life.

It is as if men thirsting in a desert sought water everywhere except near those people who, standing round a spring pollute it and offer stinking mire instead of the water that unceasingly flows beneath the mire. Maupassant was in this position; he could not believe — evidently it never even entered his head — that the truth he sought had long ago been found and was so near him; but neither could he believe that man can live in such contradiction as that in which he felt himself to be living.

Life, according to the theories in which he had been brought up, which surrounded him and were corroborated by all the lusts of his young, and mentally and physically strong, being — life consists in pleasure, of which the chief is to be found in woman with her love, and in the reproduction of this pleasure in its reflection, in the presentation of this love, and in exciting it in others. All this might be well; but on examining these pleasures quite other things emerge, alien and hostile to this love and this beauty: woman for some reason is disfigured, becomes unpleasantly pregnant and repulsive, gives birth to children, unwanted children; then come deceptions, cruelties, moral suffering, then mere old age, and ultimately death.

Then is this beauty indeed beauty? And why is all this so? It would be all very well if one could arrest life, but life goes on. And what does that mean? “Life goes on” means that the hair falls out, turns grey, the teeth decay, and there are wrinkles and offensive breath. Even before all is finished, everything becomes dreadful, repulsive: the rouge, the powder, the sweat, the smell, and the disgustingness, are evident. Where then is that which I serve? Where is beauty? But she is all! And if she is not, there is nothing left. There is no life!

But not merely is there no life in what seemed to be life: one begins to forsake it oneself, one becomes weaker, more stupid, one decays; others before one’s eyes seize those delights in which all the good of life lay. Nor is that all. Some other possibility of life begins to glimmer on one’s mind; something else, some other kind of union with men, with the whole world, one which does not admit of all these deceptions, something which cannot by any means be infringed; which is true and forever beautiful. But this cannot be. It is only the tantalizing vision of an oasis when we know that it does not exist and that there is nothing but sand everywhere.

Maupassant reached that tragic moment in life when the struggle begins between the falseness of the life about him and the truth of life of which he began to be conscious. Pangs of spiritual birth had already begun in him.

And it is these pangs of this birth that are expressed in his best work, especially in the short stories printed in this edition.

Had he not been fated to die while still suffering, but to fulfil all his possibilities, he would have left us great and illuminating works; but even what he gave us in the midst of his pain is much. Let us then be thankful to this strong and truthful man for what he has given us.